Greedy Goblin

Saturday, November 9, 2013

The largest awox in the history of EVE

Awoxing is the act in EVE where a member of a team turns on his trusting teammates, destroying their ships, alone or in cooperation with other players, who are usually hostile to the original group. There are other forms of hostile actions against teammates, like dropping Sov or stealing from hangars, but they aren't called awox, that's reserved for shooting friendly ships.

What was the largest awox in the history of EVE? You probably say "the Revenant gank", when a dozen Pandemic Legion supercarriers, including a 300B rare ship, the Revenant were destroyed by Black Legion. The commander of the PL fleet was the awoxer. He

formed a fleet under the guise of authority and loyalty

made sure that the fleet composition is completely unable to fight against hostile players. Unsupported supers.

made their fleet believe that they are just on their way for some "easy kills" without real danger, hence the above isn't a problem

made sure that reds have all means to organize the death trap by giving them every intel and giving them time to form up

dropped fleet and removed standard means of fleet leadership when the trap was activated. The famous quote "more than one [expletive] had a mouth", referred to the fact that someone could step up and lead, but no one could, despite they were members of probably the best PvP alliance.

While the above is a perfect example of an awox, it's not the largest in the history of EVE. Maybe the most expensive, but only because a moron used an overpriced toy. The largest awox happened recently, hence the extra Saturday post. Everything happened the same way as above, but this time not a dozen people were lured to a trap but thousands and not by a player, but by CCP employees. They

formed a fleet under the guise of authority and loyalty

made sure that the fleet composition is completely unable to fight against hostile players. Totally random mixture of ships of different size, range, speed, tank type.

made their fleet believe that they are just on their way for some "fun event" without real danger, hence the above isn't a problem

made sure that reds have all means to organize the death trap by giving them every intel (target system announced in twitter) and giving them time to form up (20 jumps in high TiDi)

dropped fleet and/or refused to give fleet orders after ordering to jump into the trap. Even if someone was more competent than the PL pilots in the first example (unlikely), they couldn't speak up due to lack of comms.

Now what? Last time a player used the guise of CCP authority to hurt others (by changing the official wiki to list himself as reliable trader, despite he was a scammer), he was permabanned because his actions were making the impression that CCP is helping some players against other players. This time official employees pulled the largest awox of the history of EVE. The result can only be the same: permaban, which means firing for an employee. I'm not sure if they did it because they had alts in the nullsec groups that farmed the kills or just to have a good laugh on the griefed players, but either way, they used their CCP authority to pull the awox. If random Joe would announce a "large Empire fleet", no one would have joined it. Their official tag allowed them to lure the lambs to the slaughter.

Without firing the awoxers and reimbursing the victims (the victims of the fake-ISD-supercap trader got their supers back), there will be no way to remove the "CCP devs are working for nullsec groups" stigma.

Desclaimer: I had no ships in either fleets, my whole involvement was crossing the fleet's way in highsec for two jumps. In 10% TiDi. In a freighter. I have exhumer killmails to prove that I was busy elsewhere and I’m not a butthurt carebear whining over his own loss. Those are on the forums en masse. I'm just worried that CCP employees might steal, gank or otherwise damage me or other players using their dev powers if I'm hostile to the groups where their alts are.

22 comments:

Actually, I've found the level of whining to be relatively low, all things considered.

The only question we need answered now is: Why?

Everyone is still waiting for the official explanation. At the moment, all we have is a dev saying, 'We are reading through the criticism.' This implies the event went as intended... in which case, we really should be told why they planned it.

I'm really hoping this was misfortune rather than design. Doing something like this immediately after the SOMER fiasco is beyond stupid.

And potentially worse: there was a lore report of an explosion in Syndicate, posted immediately before the notice of the Live Event. This implies the two were related. What plot point have we now lost from the Eve story? What explanations as to the nature of Sansha wormholes are now buried under a large scale gank? Link to the report below.

@Anonymous: if this was a honest whelp, then the employees driving it honestly believed that a fleet of mixed sizes, tank types, ranges, speeds, without leadership can win against organized nullsec blobs.

Do you think someone so incompetent has a place among the game devs?

I mean, I can claim without doubt that I have lead the event much more capably, despite zero FC-in experience, just by knowing that to fight, * you need some form of doctrine (even if only as "armor tanked battleships with long range weapons")* a large fleet can't take many gates due to TiDi* an FC must call targets

Remember that the events are organized by the lore/storyline guys at CCP. Is it possible that they're a group of people so detached from the game and its core mechanics and social flow that they thought they'll just take a fleet for a quick stroll through low/null largely unhindered?

There is another matter of trust, in the first live even players was invited to attack or defend Caldari Prime, but in the course of event it was clear that Shiigeru and Caldary Prime was doomed to fall (Shiigeru was killed by script), so CCP was lying. Now they invited players to FIGHT or DEFEND Pirates, but anyone with two braincell can predict that happen then highsec "fleets" will met with null warmachine. SO Empire was doomed to fall again? CCP clearly trolling players, if you create LORE then don't fucking call it LIVE EVENT, just make some movie or publish some books. in sandbox PLAYERS MUST CREATE CONTENT, not devs with stupid scripts.

First time I read the 2013-11-06 world news post [1] I thought about mayhem and a very risky event for CCP to pull of.Read the first paragraph. Whoever thought this might end well. Read it again.This had to go big.

The destination change to Ihal [2] was a bit of. So I opted out. The first thing that jumped out of dotlans map was the Curse gate few jumps away.

It was clear on that point that this was suicide and failed event. Or from another perspective a troll event.

I don't think that this kind of low or nullsec events are possible. At least not in a day. Even if there are not very much newbs out there. You will need to give them a staged event so they can at least have 2-3 days skilltime for the small hull fleets. And get some basic info (maybe a evelopedia page: low/null CCP-event preparation guide. Newb stuff that is important to learn in the few hours ahead of the BIG EVENT).

Highsec participants will not have any idea what a fleet is or needs. Nor do they know about low or null. The lack of tanks/FCs and healers/logistics was clear for the event guys right away. It was crystal clear NOT to go to .4 or below! still they did.

I hope this didn't put off to much people. Some threadnaught still go strong.

>> thou shall not trust anyone <<>> thou shall not fly stuff thou can not afford <<These are the all time and always applied rules in any situation in EVE. Hope some did learn this and not rage delete/unsub.

I have not encountered any posts crying over lost Isk. Nor critique of Razor & Co's reaction. The overwhelming reaction from the butchered fleet has been "shame on you CCP" and "couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery". I was not far from sarum 20+ jumps and no communication I opted out but it worries me to think that this level of incompetence or even downright malevolence is rife among the people who produce this game that I enjoy.

It is actually worse than you describe. In the Amarr fleet, the NPC was giving orders. The orders were to sit on the gate, until about 10% of the Amarr fleet had arrived. Then to jump through into the gate camp that everyone knew was there.

First mistake, not waiting for the whole fleet to arrive before jumping.

The orders after jumping were to burn through the bubbles, and warp to planet 4. So, no orders to actually shoot anyone on the other side. Then to all proceed to the same location. Of course, there would have been spies in the channel/local, so bubbles were set up at planet 4 too.

This mistake was replicated by changing the target to warp to planet 6.

All these terrible orders resulted in a much reduced fleet arriving at the objective, with most of the total fleet still travelling through TiDi to the staging system.

Once at the structure, the orders were not to shoot at all the NPC ships that were attacking the remainder of the fleet, but to start grinding the structure. Completely stupid.

To make this error worse, after doing this for some time, targets are switched to the NPC ships. So all this time grinding the structure was not for some heroic suicide gank.

Utter clusterfuck. I wait with interest for CCP to let us know whether this was deliberate or incompetent.

It can be summed up with two graphs.

Jumps in Hama (first system on route from Sarum Prime): http://imgur.com/xvFTE4S,lazCpPP#1Jumps in Ihal: http://imgur.com/xvFTE4S,lazCpPP#0

Thousands of players wanted to participate in the event from the Amarr fleet alone. Most of these players were not able to participate at all.

now you not only went from shitting on the community and your commentors, but on the devs as well ...

very well.do you remember when you came up with you "kb's need fixing" post, and were told to write one yourself, and backed out cause you have no programming experience ... well, maybe things are not always as easy as you think they are before giving it a thought.

but yes, ccp is total evil.the reincarnation of everything that ever has done bad on this world.they hate their clients, and are trying to do everything to make them feel miserable.

despite that you think you could have done better, we haven't witnessed any sort of fc'ing from you so far.quite the opposite, if i may remind you of your "don't fleet up" post.

it's the tone that makes the music, and your blog would be a much nicer read if you could moderate your anger a bit.

@Anomy 10/11/13 06.48'You mentioned that CCP employees were laughing at the mess... How do you know this?'

Because the situation is hilarious. The only reason why the players endured this disaster and not called it off was that they were promised cake at the end by CCP. By any reasoned person the 'event' should have been aborted the only players who benefited from from it continuing were the null sec guys.

PS For those few who got to the 'event' there was no cake only a quick ride home.

PS2 And to cap it off any highsec guy who says this event was a disaster is branded a whiner. It really is quite funny.The CSM response/Ripard Teg 'In short: CCP expected them to organize themselves and to play EVE the way we null-sec players have been doing it for years.'. LOL. Double LOL.

@Bobbins: except nullsec players don't organize "themselves". They have FCs who give them doctrines, tell them when to warp, who to shoot, when to refit, where to align, when to jump.

This is the job of the FC, CCP employees assumed this position and did none of them. I've never seen a single dev post telling what kind of ships are welcomed in the event (like armor tanked, short range battlecruisers), nor there was any target calling.

Remember the quote "more than one of you ... had mouth", which refers exactly to the fact that the average nullsec pilot who is not an FC is unable to organize himself.

To win the "fight", the highsec players needed to show skills matching nullsec FCs, because their own FCs abandoned and betrayed them. And these were CCP employees.